Systems and methods for measuring the biomass of vegetation canopies are known and used in a range of applications including environmental management and practice, forestry inventory and operations and, increasingly, in the monitoring of forest condition and growth under a number of international agreements including the Montreal and Kyoto Protocols.
Airborne Terrain Lidars are known as is their potential for use in “vegetation canopy mapping” due to the presence of returns from trees when these Lidar systems have been used in terrestrial and topographical mapping.
Airborne and spaceborne Lidar systems for measuring the statistics of forested areas are also known.